Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
With this great telescope its master reached out into the region of the nebulæ, and began the real work of exploring the sidereal heavens. In the reflecting telescope, however, there are necessary limitations. Before the middle of this century, it was known that the future of astronomy depended upon the refracting lens, and not on the speculum.
One passes from the sunny fields, where the cattle are grazing or the plough is turning the red furrow, into these gray, time-sculptured, monumental ruins, where the foundations of the everlasting hills are crumbling, and yet where the silence and the repose are like that of sidereal space. How relative everything is!
It is the great fundamental datum of astronomy the unit of space, any error in the estimation of which is multiplied and repeated in a thousand different ways, both in the planetary and sidereal systems. Hence its determination was called by Airy "the noblest problem in astronomy." It is also one of the most difficult.
For the accommodation of such as are astronomically inclined, I render the following record as I entered it upon my diary, July 16th: Civil Middle Time, 12:40 p.m.; Astronomical Middle Time, 12:39½ p.m.; Sidereal Time, 19:49¾; True Time, 12:38½ p.m. Around its great organ, there is seating accommodation for a choir of 2,000 singers.
Vitus's dance. They would foresee when it would seize upon them, and, if in the field, would hasten home to undergo the paroxysms there. From these they rose, as from magnetic sleep, without memory of what had happened. Other symptoms show the inhabitants of this region very susceptible to magnetic and sidereal influences.
These fringes of lamplight, struggling up through smoke and thousand-fold exhalation, some fathoms into the ancient reign of Night, what thinks Bootes of them, as he leads his Hunting-Dogs over the Zenith in their leash of sidereal fire?
And then, as all went merry and well with me on my celestial quest, the tip of my wand missed a star, and on the instant I knew I had been guilty of a great crime. And on the instant a knock, vast and compulsive, inexorable and mandatory as the stamp of the iron hoof of doom, smote me and reverberated across the universe. The whole sidereal system coruscated, reeled and fell in flame.
What, then, is the conclusion that remains? This only: that the nebulæ are not further from us than parts of our own sidereal system, of which they must be considered members; and that when they are resolvable into discrete masses, these masses cannot be considered as stars in anything like the ordinary sense of that word.
They tightened their mutual grasp in a sort of sidereal chiaroscuro, full of perfumes, of gleams, of music, of the luminous architecture of dreams. They belonged to each other; they knew themselves to be for ever united in the same joy and the same ecstasy; and nothing could be stranger than this construction of an Eden by two of the damned. They were inexpressibly happy.
But these adherents of inherent imperfectibility instance the fact of vanished and variable stars, as well as those that have suddenly appeared, and, after brief periods of intense brilliancy, as suddenly disappeared, to show that there are mighty disturbances in the sidereal heavens which entirely negative the idea of "conservation" as a geognostic law.
Word Of The Day